Jim Burlingame’s Top 10 Favorite Depeche Mode Songs

Jim Burlingame’s Top 10 Favorite Depeche Mode Songs

(In no order of preference)

Number One: “Shake the Disease”

Let’s say it begins with this: When I’m 10 or so, I slip into my sister’s room when she’s out and “borrow” for an extended period of time her cassette copy of Catching Up With Depeche Mode, for reasons unknown still to this day, because back then – that North American singles compilation came out in 1985 – Bay Area radio stations weren’t likely playing this Basildon-begun British synth band much, at least not until the next year when the San Francisco station KITS switched formats from Top 40 to Modern Rock – under the influence of its young weekend DJ and future music director Steve Masters – and re-identified itself as LIVE 105, a cattle brand of an FM call sign that would leave its mark on my adolescence more distinctly than even my unique family name.[1] Let’s say then that instead I had just been intrigued by this strangely-named band’s music emanating from her room, which on a subconscious level I immediately associated with every mixed emotion I had about the walls and doors and shadowy, labyrinthine dark-wood layout of that old house we shared with our parents – and the unique family dynamics the opacity of all that represented, which I wouldn’t have words of my own to articulate clearly for decades to come.

The most meaningful music in our lives performs the service of consoling and healing the damaged parts of our psyches with an ease and effectiveness seldom seen after even decades of expensive therapy, and for me Depeche Mode songs have long accomplished that – and none so much as “Shake the Disease,” one of two new singles included on Catching Up With Depeche Mode and its rest-of-the-world counterpart The Singles 81 – 85.[2] (The other new song, “It’s Called a Heart,” I remember similarly caught my ear in those early cassette-borrowing days, with its jaunty beat and melody harkening back – I would later realize – to the band’s earliest era, when Vince Clarke was the main songwriter, before leaving to found Yaz – Yazoo in the U.K. – and then Erasure, but also, poignantly juxtaposed with those throwback elements, the pleading, bittersweet themes and metaphors that became characteristic of Depeche Mode when Martin Gore took over song writing duties after their first album). “Shake the Disease” is an achingly beautiful, heavy whetstone that sharpens my knife of self-knowledge each time I listen to it, more so in fact with each year that has passed since I first came across it on that cassette compilation.

But that is no surprise, because the essence of introspection is to be open to the new sparks that may fly up at any time from the same eternally turning wheels of our life’s experiences and emotions and the repeat applications of resources – like favored music – for processing both that we set in motion especially in times of extreme disconnection from others, whether during confusing childhood dramas and even traumas or later, as adults, when immersed in challenges that seem like they should be bearable but are only framed in our minds as such because they must be in order for us to survive, while inside we struggle with alienation from not only those around us but also from the core of who we are ourselves.

Thus, this seeming one-sided tale of a couple at odds with each other set to a melody robust with rippling imperial grandeur, could equally be seen as an imperative dialogue with oneself over the obstacles we know we throw up thanks to the template our past has handed us. In fact, after the main chorus (where Dave Gahan sings: “Here is a plea from my heart to you/Nobody knows me as well as you do/You know how hard it is for me to shake the disease/That takes hold of my tongue in situations like these”), six alarm clock klaxon-like notes carry us to the brief toy piano-sounding trinkle that changes the mood as suddenly we switch to Martin Gore plaintively singing “Understand me” four times. WAKE UP, “Shake the Disease” seems to be saying here, AND PAY ATTENTION TO WHO YOU ARE ADDRESSING THIS TO, WHEN YOU SING THIS ALONE IN YOUR ROOM.

The melody is reminiscent of a regiment of royal guards marching along their course in front of a palace and then turning on their heels and marching back and then falling quickly like an avalanche of toy soldiers struck down by an impetuous playing child, because “Shake the Disease” is an ode to the control our formative years hold over us even as we grow old, and the awe we should confer upon such power.

[1] https://www.playlistresearch.com/rise/stevemasters.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake_the_Disease